Statuettes like this, of a crouching child, were regularly dedicated in Cypriot sanctuaries from about 450 BC into the Hellenistic period. Their meaning is not obvious, but they are commonly known as ‘temple boys’.

Ancient Greece | Limestone ‘temple boy’ via British Museum

The boy’s dress is raised to reveal his private parts. He wears earrings and a band of amulets across his chest. The amulets comprise a demonic head, perhaps of the Egyptian god Bes, four pendant-rings and four tubular beads. Bes was regularly used as an apotropaic figure (to drive away evil). The pendant-rings may have contained scarabs which would have had protective powers, while the beads were most probably tubular boxes for tiny figurines or papyrus or a rolled metal sheet with magical or superstitious properties.

Another type of amulet regularly worn by Cypriot temple boys is in the form of a club, which must relate to Herakles, who, like Bes, was thought to have apotropaic qualities (that is, the ability to ward off evil). The band of amulets with their magical or superstitious qualities, together with the evidence that some were dedicated to a specific god, suggest that the temple boys were ordinary dedications to place children under the protection of the divinity.

While most temple-boys come from sanctuary sites on the island of Cyprus, they have also been found elsewhere, for example at Carthage, northern Africa.

The Qatar museums authority commissioned ‘East-West/West-East’, a monumental sculptural installation by Richard Serra,situated in a desert at the Brouq Nature Reserve, approximately 60 kilometers from Doha.

Four steel plates punctuate the desert landscape, forming a close relationship to the topography of the site by crossing the peninsula of the protected park and connecting the waters of the gulf. The dark, towering beams rise to 14.7 meters and 16.7 meters above the ground, level to both each other and the gypsum plateaus on either side. Despite the vast distance that the plates span — over a kilometer from one end to the other — all four metal pillars can be viewed and explored from any point within the landscape.

The idea to work in the desert came from the Qataris. Serra recalled a conversation with Sheikha al-Mayassa during the construction of “7”: “She asked me, ‘Would you build a piece in the landscape?,’ and I said to her, ‘What landscape?,’ and she said, ‘The desert.’ ”

These gigantic steel plates are erie monoliths that wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Kubrick or Tarkovski.